Brienne-le-Château, August 15, 1780
Nobody at Brienne knew what the date meant, and Napoleone had never once explained it to anyone.
To the school it was simply the Feast of the Assumption, a day of extra prayers and a slightly better supper, the kind of holy day the monks observed with more ceremony than enthusiasm. Bourrienne had wished him a happy birthday that morning, cheerfully, without any particular weight behind it, the way a friend wishes another friend well on an ordinary Tuesday that happens to carry a number attached to it.
He hadn't told Bourrienne what else the day was.
He hadn't told anyone, because there was no clean way to say it that didn't sound, even to his own ear, like something too large for a schoolyard conversation. His mother had gone into labor with him on the very day the French navy saluted its victory over Ajaccio, cannons firing in celebration while she screamed him into the world in a house already flying a flag that wasn't hers. Eleven years later, the two things were still fused together in him the way they'd apparently been fused from his very first breath, his birthday and his country's death sharing a single date on the calendar, as though God or fate or simple bad timing had decided he should never be allowed to celebrate one without also mourning the other.
He got through the day well enough. He always did. It was only at night, alone on his cot after the dormitory's breathing had settled into sleep, that the day finally caught up with him.
You're not going to sleep, Marcus observed, quiet tonight, none of the fair's earlier warmth in it, something gentler and more careful instead.
I'm aware.
Do you want company, or would you rather I simply stayed quiet and let you sit with it alone.
The question, gently offered, undid something in Napoleone that a demand never would have. He lay still a long moment, staring at the dark stone ceiling, and found, to his own mild surprise, that he didn't actually want to be alone with it tonight, not entirely, not the way he'd been alone with it every year before this one.
Stay, he said. Just don't tell me anything wise. I don't think I can stand anything wise tonight.
I wasn't planning to. A pause, and then, softer than Napoleone had ever heard the old voice manage, Tell me about her instead. Not the mother who scolds you and calls you an idiot and swats you for the fig tree. The one from that night. The one who carried you through the mountains.
Napoleone hadn't expected the question, and found, once it had been asked, that he wanted to answer it more than he'd wanted anything all day.
She told me the story once, he said slowly, at the kitchen table, the night I asked her to teach me French properly instead of the scraps Recco gave us. She was so angry with me for asking, at first, because I'd asked for their language instead of caring about hers. And then she told me anyway. Five months pregnant, fleeing through the Monte d'Oru with Paoli's men, French patrols in the valleys below, no roads, just goat paths slick with rain. She said she cursed the saints and cursed Genoa and cursed the child tumbling inside her like a rebel himself.
That would be you.
That would be me. Something in his chest ached, old and familiar, sharper tonight than it usually let itself be. She labored the whole way back to Ajaccio. Three hundred miles, over mountains, with French soldiers behind them the entire time. I was born the same day the cannons fired for their victory. She always said it like it was funny, in her way, the kind of joke that isn't really a joke at all. The whole island falls, and out comes a son screaming loud enough to fight the noise of it.
That's not a small thing to carry alone every year, Napoleone.
No. His voice was quieter now, thinner, closer to something he rarely let show even in the dark, even to a voice no one else could hear. I don't resent the date. I've tried to, and I can't manage it properly. It just sits there every August, both things at once, and I don't think there's a version of growing older that ever separates them again.
Marcus was quiet for a long moment, and when he spoke again there was something in it Napoleone hadn't heard before, not counsel, not comfort exactly, something rawer and more honestly uncertain than the old voice usually allowed itself to sound.
I had an empire, Marcus said. Legions. Palaces. More power than any single man before or since has any right to hold. And I never once, in nineteen years of it, found a way to carry my own losses without simply carrying them. There isn't a trick to it, Napoleone. There isn't a maxim that makes the weight lighter. I used to write to myself at night, the same way you're lying here now, trying to talk my own grief into something manageable, and most nights it never quite obeyed me. I only want you to know that. Not because it fixes anything. Only because I think you should know that even I never solved it, and I had eight centuries longer to try than you've had.
Something in Napoleone's chest loosened, not because the ache had lifted, but because, for the first time in eleven years of Augusts, it hadn't felt entirely like his to carry alone.
Thank you, he said, very quietly, into the dark.
For what.
For not being wise tonight, when you clearly wanted to be.
Something that might have been a soft, tired laugh moved through the old voice, warm despite everything. You noticed that.
I notice everything. You've told me so yourself, more than once, usually right before scolding me for it.
I have. A pause, gentler still. Sleep, if you can manage it. And if you can't, I'll stay awake with you until you do. I've had considerably more practice than you at sitting up through a long night without complaint.
Napoleone closed his eyes, the ache in his chest still present but somehow more bearable now, shared rather than simply endured, and let the fifteenth of August finally, quietly, become the sixteenth, the way it always eventually did, the way it always would, whatever it cost him each time to get there.